In the fledgling decades of sound
cinema, one of the best parts of going to the
movies was to catch the latest serials before
the feature. Each chapter in a serial was around
fifteen minutes in length and related the exploits
of some comic hero, such as The
Lone Ranger, The
Shadow, or even Flash
Gordon. Every chapter would end with a
cliffhanger and the only way to find out what
happened was to go to theatre the very next week
and see the next installment. One of the most
popular serial characters was Zorro.

After initial success with the silent
Fairbanks film, The Mark
of Zorro, in 1920, Hollywood took the character
to the serials. Zorro
Rides Again was the first, soon followed
by Zorro's
Fighting Legion. In this first serial, the
original Zorro has been dead for many years, but
when the Vegas are threatened by a group of bandits
working for a profiteer bent on destroying the
Vegas' railroad project, Zorro's great-grandson
takes up the mask and whip and squares off against
the injustice.

Sure, the acting was not excellent.
The sets were cheap, the editing was less than
masterful, and the dialogue was hardly Shakespeare,
but all serials were that way, and they thrived
on their endearing sense of moral innocence. Also,
the serial was the incubator for the modern stunt
man. A good serial sported the best stunts and
action scenes cinema could offer, and it was in
the Zorro serials that pioneering stuntmen like
Yakima Canutt (who was huge inspiration for the
Indiana Jones films) honed their craft.

Zorro as a serial character was
a massive influence on Indiana Jones. It was from
Zorro that Indiana Jones acquired his trademark
weapon, the bullwhip. In Zorro
Rides Again, the whip is put into play
over and over, getting almost as much screen time
as Zorro himself. In exactly the same fashion
as Indiana Jones, Zorro carries his whip coiled
on his belt. In the beginning of the film, in
a scene similar to the Ravenwood Bar from Raiders
of the Lost Ark, Zorro arrives just in
time to save the Vegas from the bandits, starting
the fight by whipping the gun from the leader's
hand. He makes this a habit throughout the film,
consistently disarming people with the whip, even
pulling it off with his back turned in one scene!

The whip antics do not end there.
During a fight on the train tracks, Zorro grapples
with the leader of the bandits, who traps his
foot in the rails using the track switch. With
the train barreling down on him, Zorro grabs his
whip just in time and manages to snag the switch
and release his foot. Later in the film, Zorro
uses his whip around a high post to climb an adobe
fort, which echoes Indiana Jones climbing the
statue in the Well of Souls. Later, Zorro uses
the whip to swing out of a high window, very much
like Indy does at the castle in Indiana
Jones and the Last Crusade.

Zorro
jumping from his
horse onto a truck.

Besides the whip action, other elements
of this serial inspired the adventuring archaeologist
as well. The action and stunts throughout the
serial are in the same spirit as the entire Indiana
Jones series. The most striking of these stunts
is a scene in which Zorro jumps from his horse
onto the side of a moving truck and into the cab.
The shot, compositionally, is almost exactly the
same as the shot from Raiders
of the Lost Ark, when Indy jumps from his
horse into the truck to steal back the Ark.

Zorro Rides
Again is a great popcorn flick. All right,
so Zorro tends to sing like a troubadour in some
riding sequences, he wears his holsters backwards
for some strange reason, and he sounds like Dark
Helmet from Spaceballs,
but any Indiana Jones fan will get a kick out
of watching it.
(MF)

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